Slashdot Mirror

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne has announced a ban on the playing of pop music at funerals, which, he said, are not to be described as 'a celebration of the life of' the deceased. According to new guidelines published on Archbishop Denis Hart's Web site: 'Secular items are never to be sung or played at a Catholic funeral, such as romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs.' According to a cemetery contacted by Melbourne's Herald Sun, a list of more unusual songs played at Australian funerals includes: 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life' by Monty Python, 'Another One Bites the Dust' by Queen, 'Highway to Hell,' by AC/DC and 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead' from The Wizard of Oz."

Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"

A recent NYT piece explores the never-ending quest for password-based security, to which reader climenole responds with a snippet from ReadWriteWeb that argues it's time to think more seriously about life beyond passwords, at least beyond keeping a long list of individual login/password pairs: "These protective measures don't go very far, according to the New York Times, because hackers can get ahold of passwords with software that remotely tracks keystrokes, or by tricking users into typing them in. The story touches on a range of issues around the problem, but neglects to mention the obvious: the march toward a centralized login for multiple sites."

theodp writes "Late on Monday, Oracle announced that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has joined the company as a co-president and a director. Hurd resigned from HP a month ago, after an investigation by the board into a personal relationship with a contractor turned up questionable expenses. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Hurd, criticized HP's board at the time, saying it was 'the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs.' 'Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle,' Ellison said in a statement Monday. 'There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.' Stepping down to make room for Hurd was Charles E. Phillips Jr., who had some personal relationship issues of his own."

Hugh Pickens writes "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on Facebook had 3,956 'likes' and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members 'were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes' and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. 'They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.'"

pickens writes "The NY Times weekend magazine has a long profile, well worth reading, of self-described 'working actor' William Shatner. He began acting at age 6 and at one point in the late 1950s was mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford — until, without explanation, his career faded before it bloomed. Shatner, now 79, pulls no punches in his memories of the Star Trek years. 'I never thought it'd become a big deal, just 13 episodes and out,' says Shatner. 'I didn't think I was hard to get along with. There were a few disaffected actors who came in once a week. I had nothing to do with them. Friendly! I was working seven days a week, learning 10 pages of dialogue a day. They had one line!' Which was the beginning of the William Shatner character. 'They said I was this William Shatner character, and I figured I had to be it. Pompous, takes himself seriously, hardheaded.' Shatner said that that character evolved slowly, until one day he realized he couldn’t change it. 'So I played it. But I didn’t see it. That character doesn’t seem like me to me. I know the real William Shatner.'"

eldavojohn writes "Analysts are saying that this year will be the first year YouTube turns a profit. From the New York Times article: 'In the last year, the video site has become a significant contributor to the family business at a time when Google, which makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from text search ads, is seeking a second act. Though Google does not report YouTube's earnings, it has hinted that it is hovering near profitability. Analysts say YouTube will bring in around $450 million in revenue this year and earn a profit. Revenue at YouTube has more than doubled each year for the last three years, according to the company.' Of course a little over a year ago we were being told that YouTube was losing around $1.65 million each day. Regardless, when you pay $1.65 billion for a business, you probably don't expect it to take three to four years before you start making your money back."

crimeandpunishment writes "It was the big deal Dell wanted in a big way. But now that it has lost out to Hewlett-Packard in the bidding war it started for 3Par, where does Dell go in its effort to diversify its business and move into the higher-profit area of selling technology to other companies? The company faces significant challenges, largely due to its lower-end focus, and because many of its competitors beat Dell into branching out. One analyst says, 'People see [Dell] as box-pushers'."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Consumer Watchdog is running a 540-square-foot video billboard advertisement in Times Square, New York that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an ingratiating ice cream truck driver who knows everything about everyone and happily offers free ice cream in exchange for full body scans. The group says its goal is to push Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to create a Do Not Track Me list, similar to the Do Not Call list developed to prevent telemarketers from aggressively calling consumers. 'Do you want Google or any other online company looking over your shoulder and tracking your every move online just so it can increase its profits?' writes the group's president, Jamie Curtis, at the group's web site. 'Consumers have a right to privacy. They should control how their information is gathered and what it is used for.' The FTC's consumer affairs group had no comment on whether the agency is considering creating a Do Not Track Me list."

pickens writes "David Pogue writes in the NY Times that when you buy a new Windows PC, it comes festooned with stickers on the palm rests: one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on. 'It's like buying a new, luxury car — and discovering that it comes with non-removable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using,' writes Pogue. But the worst thing is that when you peel them off, they shred, leaving adhesive crud behind. 'When you've just spent big bucks on a laptop, should you really be obligated to spend the first 20 minutes trying to dissolve away the sticker goop with WD40?' But AMD has a solution. Starting next year, AMD will switch to new stickers that peel off easily, leaving no residue; after that, it's considering eliminating the sticker program altogether."

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Neal Stephenson's company Subutai has released the first installment of Stephenson's new novel, Mongoliad, about the Mongol invasion of Europe, using what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video and there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers. Stephenson says the material is an extension of what many science fiction and fantasy novels already offer. 'I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary,' Stephenson says. 'Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me.' Jeremy Bornstein says Subutai is experimenting with a new model for publishing books and says the traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content can 'be canned and sent around to your friends for free,' but that people will hopefully still pay for content if 'the experience is so much more rich, so much more involving.'"

eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on a new kind of web ad that takes products you were looking at purchasing on one site and continually advertising them in front of you at subsequent sites. After looking at shoes at Zappos, a mother in Montreal noticed the shoes followed her: 'For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes. It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.' The spreading ploy is called 'retargeting ads' and really are just a good demonstration of how an old technology (all they use are leftover browser cookies) are truly invasive and privacy violating. Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list — adding that retailers really show little fear of turning off customers with their invasion."

pickens writes "The NY Times reports on a digital camera put together at Kodak's Elmgrove Plant labs in Rochester, NY during the winter of 1975 from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera that took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck and using a customized reader could display the image on an old black and white television. Called 'Film-less Photography,' it took a 'year of piecing together a bunch of new technology' to create the camera which ran off 'sixteen nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter.' When the team of technicians presented the camera to Kodak audiences they heard a barrage of curious questions including — 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?'"

eldavojohn writes "So, you pay a PR firm like Reverb to generate some positive buzz for your new mobile game, and what do they do? Hire employees to post fake glowing reviews of your game wherever it's being distributed. The FTC says that's not okay due to regulations enacted last year requiring that paid reviews disclose they are paid reviews. Originally, the fear was that this regulation would target the small-time blogger, but this news of Reverb settling with the FTC over fake game reviews shows that the FTC is also targeting big PR firms. They said, 'We hope that this case will show advertisers that they have to be transparent in their practices and help guide other ad agencies.' The article says fake reviews like those alleged in the complaint (PDF) are pretty much the norm on iTunes. Reverb denies that this settlement is any acknowledgment of wrongdoing; rather, just a timesaver over a costly court battle. Will the FTC continue to make examples of big PR firms? Wait and see."

jowifi writes "The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has confirmed that, in 2008, a foreign agent instigated 'the most significant breach of US military computers ever' using a USB flash drive. While the breach was previously reported on Wired and the LA Times, this is the first official confirmation of the attack that led to the banning of USB drives on government computers."

siliconbits writes with an excerpt from NY Times: "Technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas."

Hugh Pickens writes "In hospitals around the country, nurses connect and disconnect interchangeable clear plastic tubing sticking out of patients' bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood — sometimes with deadly consequences. Tubes intended to inflate blood-pressure cuffs have been connected to intravenous lines leading to deadly air embolisms, intravenous fluids have been connected to tubes intended to deliver oxygen, leading to suffocation, and in 2006 a nurse at in Wisconsin mistakenly put a spinal anesthetic into a vein, killing 16-year-old who was giving birth. 'Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake,' says Nancy Pratt, a vocal advocate for changing the system. Critics say the tubing problem, which has gone on for decades, is an example of how the FDA fails to protect the public. 'FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die,' says Dr. Robert Smith." This reminds me of the sort of problem that Michael Cohen addressed in a slightly different medical context (winning a MacArthur Foundation grant) a few years ago.

Last year we discussed news that the Authors Guild took issue with the Kindle's text-to-speech function, claiming it was illegal for the device to read their books aloud. Amazon disagreed, but said they were willing to disable the feature upon request from rightsholders. Now, jamie notes a recent article by David Pogue at the NY Times in which he points out that Apple's free iBooks app does the same thing, yet the Authors Guild has remained silent. Quoting: "... Now swipe down the page with two fingers to make the iPhone start reading the book to you, out loud, with a synthesized voice. It even turns the pages automatically and keeps going until you tap with two fingers to stop it. Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody's even realized this feature is in there." That said, the feature was certainly noticed during the launch of the iPad, so perhaps the Authors Guild has other reasons for holding their peace.

theodp writes "The National Park Service is finding technology to be a double-edged sword. While new technologies can and do save lives, the NPS is also finding that unseasoned hikers and campers are now boldly going where they never would have gone before, counting on cellphones, GPS, and SPOT devices to bail them out if they get into trouble. Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"

caffeinemessiah writes "With the recent launch of Facebook Places, the rise to prominence of Foursquare and GoWalla, and articles in the New York Times about the increasing popularity of 'checking in' to locations using GPS-enabled mobile phones, a number of businesses are wondering how to reward frequent patrons. But exactly how susceptible are these 'location based services' to being abused? A researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago shows how easily Foursquare can be gamed in 9 Perl statements, and invites readers to submit more succinct versions of the code to game the system." An anonymous reader contributes a link to a similar article about spoofing Facebook Places to create an alibi.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems like every week there's a new story about the consequences of all those concussions experienced by football players and other athletes — just a few days ago, the NY Times reported that some athletes diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease may actually have a neural disease brought on by head trauma. But missing in these stories is an explanation of what head trauma actually does to the brain cells. Now Carl Zimmer has filled in the gap with a column that takes a look at how neurons respond to stress, and explains how stretching a neuron's axon turns its internal structure into 'mush.'"

Several readers have noted that Intel has agreed to buy McAfee, the computer antivirus software maker, for about $7.7 billion in cash. There is also a press release available if you are into that sort of thing.

thecarchik writes with an excerpt from Green Car Reports: "We already know that it's possible to curb your fuel consumption just by having your tires properly inflated, or better yet, installing a set of low rolling-resistance tires, however, soon there may be an additional avenue to look at when picking the most fuel efficient rubber for your ride. The answer is the camber of your tires, more specifically, the negative camber. This is when the tops of your car's tires are angled inwards towards the chassis. Of course, there are negative effects too — namely increased tire wear and impaired ride quality — which is why production cars almost always have zero camber." The linked article, as well as the New York Times article from which it draws, describe a new tire which is designed to minimize those negative effects.

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that security experts and privacy advocates have begun warning consumers about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. By looking at geotags of uploaded photos, 'you can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away,' says one security expert. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online."

Peter Eckersley writes "Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon, calling for investigation of a trusted SSL Certificate Authority. Etisalat is a majority state-owned telecom of the United Arab Emirates with operations throughout the Middle East. You may remember that last year Etisalat installed malware on its subscribers' BlackBerry phones, and was recently pivotal in the UAE's threat to disconnect BlackBerry devices altogether if Research In Motion did not provide a backdoor for BES servers' crypto. This company, which appears to be institutionally hostile to the existence and use of secure cryptosystems, is in possession of a master certificate for HTTPS, encrypted POP and IMAP, and other SSL-based security systems. Etisalat's CA certificate is not trusted directly by Mozilla and Microsoft, but was instead delegated as an Intermediate CA by Verizon. As a result, we are asking Verizon to investigate whether it is appropriate for Etisalat to continue holding this certificate, and to consider revoking it."

jamie passes along a story in the NY Times about how an unprecedented level of openness and data-sharing among scientists involved in the study of Alzheimer's disease has yielded a wealth of new research papers and may become the template for making progress in dealing with other afflictions. Quoting: "The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. 'It was unbelievable,' said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. 'It's not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.'"

daem0n1x writes "It appears that some countries in oil-poor Europe are making a successful transition to renewable energy at a fast and steady pace. This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines. Portugal has no oil, but lots of sun and wind. Five years ago, the government decided, against many dissenting voices, to invest massively in taking advantage of the country's natural resources in clean energy. The results are here. It used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it."

Flash Modin writes "Death Star style superlasers? Don't bet on it. High-power lasers currently in development appear to be nearing the theoretical laser intensity limit, according to new research set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter as shown in the late '90s at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). This process creates an 'avalanche-like electromagnetic cascade' (also known as sparking the vacuum) capable of destroying a laser field. Physicists thought it might be a problem for lasers eventually, but this work indicates the technology is much closer to its limit than researchers believed. A preprint is available here."

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting that former Senator Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane with eight others that crashed in remote southwest Alaska Monday night. Some news outlets are reporting that he died, along with at least four others. Meanwhile, the North American CEO of aerospace firm EADS and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was was also reported in the crash. Rescue crews from the Alaska Air National Guard reached the site about ten hours after the initial crash."

theodp writes "No stranger himself to sexual harassment allegations, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has denounced HP's directors for forcing the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd. 'The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,' Ellison wrote. For now, it seems that Rupert Murdoch is also standing by Hurd, who sits on News Corp's Board of Directors and its Corporate Governance Committee. Less likely to survive the scandal is Hurd's relationship with HP General Counsel Mike Holston, who accepted Hurd's signed separation agreement after leading an investigation into Hurd's actions, which Holston told the NY Times 'showed a profound lack of judgment.' Quite a change from just last year, when Hurd and Holston teamed up to get their daughters' elite prep school a state-of-the-art HP Data Center."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a list of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by September 30 after discussions with provincial and municipal officials to identify industrial operations with outdated, inefficient technology. The goal of the factory closings is 'to enhance the structure of production, heighten the standard of technical capability and international competitiveness and realize a transformation of industry from being big to being strong,' the ministry says. The current Chinese five-year plan calls for using 20 percent less energy this year for each unit of economic output than in 2005 but surging production by heavy industry since last winter has put in question China's ability to meet this target. In addition to the energy-efficiency objective in the current five-year plan, a plan announced by President Hu Jintao late last year called for China to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of economic output by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels."

omnibit writes "The New York Times reports that researchers have found a spinal-fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease. The new study included more than 300 patients in their seventies, 114 with normal memories, 200 with memory problems, and 102 with Alzheimer's disease. Their spinal fluid was analyzed for amyloid beta, which forms plaques in the brain, and for tau, another protein that accumulates in dead and dying nerve cells in the brain. Nearly every person with Alzheimer's had the characteristic spinal fluid protein levels."

pickens writes "Robert X. Cringley has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he contends that Google has found a way to get special treatment from Verizon without actually compromising net neutrality, by beginning to co-locate some of their portable data centers with Verizon network hubs. 'With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay,' writes Cringley. 'This would save space for other traffic — and money for both Verizon and Google, as their backbone bills decline (wishful thinking, but theoretically possible). Net neutrality would be not only intact, but enhanced.' So why won't Google and Verizon admit what they're up to? 'If my guess is right, then I would think they're silent because it's a secret. They'd rather their competitors not know until a few hundred shipping containers are in place — and suddenly YouTube looks more like HBO.'"

suraj.sun sends word of a 100-sq.-mile (260-sq.-km) ice island that broke off of a Greenland glacier on Thursday. "The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland. It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962... The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. ... [NASA satellite] images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to 'keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,' said Prof Muenchow." The Montreal Gazette has more details and implications for Canadian shipping and oil exploration, along with this telling detail: "the ice island’s thickness [is] more than 200 metres in some places... [or] half the height of the Empire State Building." The NY Times has a good satellite photo of the situation.

gmp writes "The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are reporting on a new paper, published in the science journal Cell Stem Cell, where scientists, inspired by the ability of newts and other lower organisms to regrow lost limbs, have demonstrated that adult mammalian cells can be made to regenerate by suppressing a pair of anti-cancer genes. 'Interfering with tumor suppressor genes is a dangerous game, but Dr. Pomerantz said the genes could be inhibited for just a short period by applying the right dose of drug. When the drug has dissipated, the antitumor function of the gene would be restored. Finding the right combination of genes to suppress was a critical step in the new research. One of the two tumor suppressor genes is an ancient gene, known as Rb, which is naturally inactivated in newts and fish when they start regenerating tissue. Mammals possess both the Rb gene and a backup, called the Arf gene, which will close down a cancer-prone cell if Rb fails to do so.' Is regeneration nature's default, only turned off by our evolved defenses against cancer?"

pickens writes "In 2005, there were 44 licensed video game arcades in New York, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs; today, 23 survive. With the expansion of interactive online gaming, video game action has largely shifted to the home. 'Arcades are an anachronism now,' says Danny Frank, a spokesman for the Amusement and Music Owners Association of New York. 'They exist only in shopping malls.' But Chinatown Fair has become a center for all the outcasts in the city to bond over their shared love for a good 20-punch combo and 'old school' games that more popular arcades don't stock anymore — the classic Street Fighter II from 1991 and King of Fighters 1996, for example, as well as Ms Pac-Man and Time Crisis. 'Now, you can play a million people from all around the world,' says one player. 'For me, it's not the same as playing face-to-face. The young'uns may not care, but I do.'"

Nrbelex writes "Google and Verizon are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators are willing to pay for the privilege. Any agreement between Verizon and Google could also upend the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to assert its authority over broadband service, which was severely restricted by a federal appeals court decision in April. People close to the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly about them said an agreement could be reached as soon as next week. If completed, Google, whose Android operating system powers many Verizon wireless phones, would agree not to challenge Verizon's ability to manage its broadband Internet network as it pleased." Update: 08/05 20:03 GMT by T : nr3a1 writes with this informative update excerpted from Engadget: "Google's Public Policy Twitter account just belted out a denial of these claims, straight-up saying that the New York Times 'is wrong.' Here's the full tweet, which certainly makes us feel a bit more at ease. For now. '@NYTimes is wrong. We've not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.' Verizon's now also issued a statement and, like Google, it's denying the claims in the original New York Times report."

suraj.sun sends in word that the country's largest bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, will put itself up for sale. "The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. ... For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. 'There's been a long series of pressures,' said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. 'The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it's for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it's for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.'"

gollum123 passes along a piece from the NY Times on the building resistance to Hollywood's 3-D plans — from filmmakers. "A joke making the rounds online involves a pair of red and green glasses and some blurry letters that say, 'If you can’t make it good, make it 3-D.' While Hollywood rushes dozens of 3-D movies to the screen — nearly 60 are planned in the next two years, including 'Saw VII' and 'Mars Needs Moms!' — a rebellion among some filmmakers and viewers has been complicating the industry’s jump into the third dimension. Several influential directors took surprisingly public potshots at the 3-D boom during the recent Comic-Con... Behind the scenes..., filmmakers have begun to resist production executives eager for 3-D sales. For reasons both aesthetic and practical, some directors often do not want to convert a film to 3-D or go to the trouble and expense of shooting with 3-D cameras, which are still relatively untested on big movies with complex stunts and locations. Tickets for 3-D films carry a $3 to $5 premium, and industry executives roughly estimate that 3-D pictures average an extra 20 percent at the box office. Filmmakers like Mr. Whedon and Mr. Abrams argue that 3-D technology does little to enhance a cinematic story, while adding a lot of bother."

An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the recession has impacted product counterfeiters. In it, the reporter regurgitates the oft-repeated claim that counterfeiting 'costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year.' Techdirt's Mike Masnick asks the Times reporter to back up that assertion, noting two recent reports (by the GAO and the OECD) that suggest the actual number is much lower, and quoting two reporters who have actually looked at the numbers and found (a) the real number is probably less than $5 billion, and (b) the $200 billion number can be traced back to a totally unsourced (read: made-up) magazine claim from two decades ago."

theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."

New Delhi police have a new weapon in the battle against bad drivers, Facebook. Two months ago the police created a Facebook page that allowed people to inform on others breaking traffic laws, and upload pictures of the violations. The page has more than 17,000 fans, and 3,000 pictures currently. From the article: "The online rap sheet was impressive. There are photos of people on motorcycles without helmets, cars stopped in crosswalks, drivers on cellphones, drivers in the middle of illegal turns and improperly parked vehicles. Using the pictures, the Delhi Traffic Police have issued 665 tickets, using the license plate numbers shown in the photos to track vehicle owners, said the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, Satyendra Garg."

suraj.sun writes with this news from CNET: "A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site — Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor — was detained by US agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference. He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project. Appelbaum, a US citizen, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland Thursday morning, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said." Appelbaum told me that he just spoke at length with The New York Times, and quipped that his Defcon talk about Tor was "just fine, until the FBI showed up"; this post will likely be updated with more details. Update: 08/02 03:59 GMT by T : Here's the NYT's coverage.

theodp writes "Remember those old Lifecall commercials? Well, you've come a long way, Grandma! The NY Times reports on a raft of new technology that's making it possible for adult children to remotely monitor to a stunningly precise degree the daily movements and habits of their aging parents. The purpose is to provide enough supervision to allow elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home. Systems like GrandCare, BeClose, QuietCare, and MedMinder allow families to keep tabs on Mom and Dad's whereabouts, and make sure they take their meds. Perhaps Zynga can make a game out of all this — GeriatricVille?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times covers a report released by the National Research Council, which says the ability of the US to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding. The goals of the highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, is to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace. 'Although US nuclear forensics capabilities are substantial and can be improved, right now they are fragile, under-resourced and, in some respects, deteriorating,' the report warns. 'Without strong leadership, careful planning and additional funds, these capabilities will decline.' The report calls on the federal government to take steps to strengthen its forensic capabilities and argues for the necessity of better planning, more robust budgets, clearer lines of authority and more realistic exercises."

eldavojohn writes "Massive confusion occurred last night for Google's Chinese search engine and ad services when Google's automated reporting system claimed that everything was blocked in China. The problem was that most users experienced no outage despite Google's reports and Google has backpedaled on those reports. Google explained that their tool for detecting blockage is not 'real-time': 'Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.' The WSJ blogger notes, 'Beijing may not need to cancel Google's license. Death by a thousand disruptions could be just as effective.'"

js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."

Among other charges, David H. Brooks is accused of offering employment with a few too many benefits, namely prostitutes. In addition to the girls-for-hire, Brooks is also accused of using company money to buy textbooks for his daughter, porn for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, and $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds for himself. From the article: "The expense-account abuse, the prosecution has said, represented a pittance compared with the $190 million that Mr. Brooks and another top employee are accused of making through a stock fraud scheme in which he falsified information about his company’s performance — including significantly overstating the inventory of bulletproof vests — to inflate the price of the stock before selling his shares in 2004."

FlorianMueller writes "The European Commission announced today that it has launched two parallel antitrust investigations into IBM's mainframe practices, following complaints lodged by T3 Technologies last year and French open source startup TurboHercules in March. EU regulators suspect an abuse of a dominant position and illegal tying of IBM's mainframe hardware to its proprietary mainframe operating system z/OS. There's even the possibility of a third case based on a complaint filed very recently by NEON, and the DoJ is also looking into this matter. IBM now finds itself in a situation previously experienced by Microsoft and Intel. This may also affect IBM's credibility when lobbying in the EU for open standards." Reader coondoggie points out a response from IBM saying that the accusations are being driven by Microsoft and other competitors.

Hugh Pickens recommends a long piece in last week's NY Times Magazine covering a wide swath of research and thinking in the US and elsewhere on the subject of the perils to society of recording everything permanently, and the idea that perhaps we ought to build forgetting into the Internet. "We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism, and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is, at an almost existential level, threatening to our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew. In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites the case of Stacy Snyder — who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace — as a reminder of the importance of 'societal forgetting.' By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.' In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.' He concludes that 'without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.'"